In Boston again, for the second time in a month. Feeling the winter here cut through my coat collar reminds me of places even further north. Incidentally, I just came across this rambling bit, from a nondescript text file I left on my own desktop in November 2006. There are not enough stars in Boston. (More…)
Today I was going through my expenses for the month, and thought to myself, entering numbers off receipts onto Excel and categorizing them is ridiculously tedious. And it’s not like I do anything with all this data I collect about my spending habits. This is really unnecessary and obsessive-compulsive. What if I designed an application (More…)
Sand Dollars “What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment,” writes the doctor Harriet Hall in Skeptic Magazine. “We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us.” Hall is talking about placebos, those pills used by doctors and scientists that don’t contain any medicine, but (More…)
I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline. This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire (More…)
Ever have a friend ask you to see a movie you’ve never heard of? They hear it’s good. You hesitate, wondering if you should read a review or watch the trailer. Next time, don’t think twice. Just say yes and watch it. I saw three recent films on a suggestion and a whim: Synecdoche, New (More…)